


notes from a heartbreak in progress

by opensummer



Series: dear forgiveness, [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: (sort of), Alien Culture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Artist Kara Danvers, Canon-Typical Violence, Cultural Differences, Gen, Genius Kara Zor-El, Genocide, Kara Danvers Arrived On Earth On Time, Kara Zor-El: Actual Alien, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-11 11:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13523370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opensummer/pseuds/opensummer
Summary: Kara, thirteen to seventeen. Smallville near suffocates her.(Wherein Kara Zor-El is nine years late, not twenty five and it makes all the difference in the world.)





	notes from a heartbreak in progress

**Author's Note:**

> I spend a lot of time thinking about Kara Zor-El and how she should _terrify_ you and that turned into Kara Zor-El, Actual Alien. Which turned into a series of one shots wherein Kara Zor-El grieves, suffers culture clash, refuses to assimilate, saves the world and spends a fair amount of time being pretty goddam emo. It's not like she witnessed first hand the death of her culture or anything. 
> 
> (It's one-shots because I can't write chapter transitions to save my life.)

Kara Zor-El is thirteen and heartbroken and passing through the nightmare of the Phantom Zone did her no favors. Her pod crashes in a forest that’s too orderly to be natural, trees in perfect rows, in July.  The chronometer tells her she’s nine years late. Kara kicks for the release too far from her feet in a pod designed for adults. When it opens the world is too loud for her to bear it.  She sucks in a breath of this planet’s air, looks at the color of her skin under a yellow sun, and bursts into tears.

When the tears stop coming and Kara gets her breathing under control, she tells the pod’s computer to find Kal-El.  

It tells her his location after a few minutes as she checks the exterior over for flaws. She can hear people coming, sirens, and a low whup in the air that might be a skimmer. The pod gave her the ten most common languages on this world. (She thought it barbaric to have more than one.) The men coming for her are speaking about violence in English.

“Are you fit to fly?” She asks the AI, pulling up her cousin’s location on the main screen.

“Yes Kara Zor-El.”

“Take me to my cousin. Shield and cloak first.”

And the pod takes off, dodging a flying machine powered by the whirling blades above.

It’s a short flight for the pod and it touches down on an open field outside a house broadcasting Kal-El’s location.   

“Defensive measures,” she tells the ship. “Cloak until I come back. I’m going to find my cousin.”

And she does. _Rao_ help her.

* * *

The Kents are good people, for all that they have been lying to her cousin for years. They take one look at her, at the symbol on her chest and ask if she’s come for their son. Kara thinks they might even have given Kal to her if she had been older or less alone.

Instead when they ask she crumbles into tears on their front stoop. Martha folds her into a hug, then bundles her into their kitchen. She makes Kara hot chocolate as Jonathan takes Clark out to the yard to play. Martha draws the whole horrible affair from her.

“Krypton,” she says, and- “My cousin Kal-El,” and- “I was supposed to look out for him.”

She cries then, in the Kents overwarm kitchen, and Martha wraps her up in a hug that does very little for the hurt she feels.

* * *

The pod arranges the documentation necessary for a niece, Martha’s brother’s daughter. It creates a background for her- daughter of scientists, raised abroad, homeschooled until now. It inserts a digital trail into the state’s archives and grows the file over the course of years.     

It’s Martha who brings her hot chocolate, when her nightmares are too much. Martha who teaches her how to sew when she tells her about the family crest, and how shameful it is for her to be without. Jonathan does not know what to do with a new daughter. Especially not a daughter eager to get her time with her cousin back. Kara wants to tell Kal he is Kryptonian, wants to teach him what that means.

(Kara never doubts that the Kents love her. She simply doubts their ability to understand her.)

There is a gulf between them fifty light years wide and it widens with the development of her powers

But they give her this: a home, a place to heal, her cousin- bright, strong, and happy.

She’ll forgive them anything for that.

* * *

When Kara is fourteen, her math teacher mentions the Millennial Problems as a way to make them feel small. The class hadn’t been paying attention and the teacher was being petty. Because she’s curious and unwilling to go straight home, Kara goes to the library.

It’s a aging building in the center of Smallville, packed tight with shelves and books. It is the closest Kara has felt to home on this planet.

(On Krypton information was stored on crystals inserted into a data reader, not the corpses of trees. But the closeness of the shelves and the lines of books could be the crystal archives with a bit of imagination.)

She asks the librarian, Mrs. McCall about them and she finds Kara a reference book with the problems laid out. It’s a few years out of date but still useful. She reads the problems over, copies them out, and then solves them, one after another, over the course of the next three hours.

When she’s done, she checks her work, folds it in half, and tucks it into her backpack. She puts the book back where they found it, waves goodbye to Mrs. McCall and walks home at a pace that feels achingly slow.

When she’s back to the Kent’s she goes to the barn and shows the paper full of “unsolvable” problems to the hologram of her mother.  Formally in Kryptonian, she says, “I do not have the right to shape them in our image.”

“That is your choice.” Says the image of her mother.

“I cannot force them to do anything, and I cannot give them the technology that would change them.”

“Your reasoning being?”

“They are not children.” Kara says, all of fourteen years herself, “And I am not Rao.”

“But I will help them.” She declares.

And her mother smiles.

* * *

When Kara is fifteen a flash flood hits Granville, fifty miles to the west. It’s around nine pm and she can hear the rush of water, the screams and crunch of a car being swept away. She doesn’t even think before she’s throwing herself out the door, flying for the sound. She’s halfway there when she realizes and pulls up the hood of her hoodie, hoping the dark and the confusion will do the rest.

She leaps for the car, bobbing down the river and lands on it, pulling the door off its hinges.  She throws it aside and gently, gently pulls the couple in it out of the car. The boy is unconscious. The girl bleeding from a head wound, still coherent enough to ask “whaaa” before Kara leaps away with them underarm.

She deposits them on the bank, leaps for the next source of sound, a handful of cows. Those she lifts one by one out of the river.

By then she’s hearing sirens and people moving in to help. She can’t explain her presence, barefoot and wearing a sodden hoodie. So she flies home exhilarated by the experience.

Jonathan and Martha are waiting for her when she lets herself in.

* * *

The girl she saved tells her story to anybody who will listen, about an angel, who saved her and her boyfriend’s life. It’s gets some play on conservative stations, an angel coming to save a pretty Christian girl from middle America but little more.

At least until the next time.

* * *

The next time is an oil tanker swerving to avoid a dog that’s run out on the road, thirty miles southwest of town. It’s past midnight and Kara is supposed to be asleep when she hears the crash of the tanker overturning. Hears the crackle of fire, a stunned groan, barking. She hesitates this time, ears still blistered from the lecture Jonathan and Martha gave her. She doesn’t hesitate long though, throwing the same red hoodie over her pjs and going through the window.   

She pulls the driver out of the cab, murmuring reassurances, puts out the engine fire before it reaches the tank. She waits until the sirens are right on top of them before flying away. She calls in the accident from a payphone in Metropolis, and lets herself back into the house silently.

The next day, she’s doing her morning chores when the local radio station reports on the Angel of Granville saving a truck driver from his rig after an accident.

She braces herself for the Kents reaction.

* * *

The truck driver saw a girl in a hoodie and shorts, barefoot, outlined by the fire from his truck, heard her voice. She looked like any other teenage girl until she lifted him from the truck and carried him to the median strip. Until she took a great breath and blew out the fire. He’d mentioned her to a paramedic when the ambulance came roaring up, still in shock from the accident. The paramedic sold the story to a radio producer who needed something to fill the air. He refused to talk about it when the radio men came round for a interview, didn’t show them the bruises on his arms in the shape of her hands that proved her existence.

* * *

Kara keeps saving people. Her range gets wider and wider, and Jonathan’s jaw gets tighter and tighter. Kara swears sometimes she can hear his teeth grinding from across the state, and they have the exact same fight every single time he learns about another of her rescues.

Jonathan Kent is afraid, not of the children he’s raising but of what the world will do to them when it finds out they exist.

Kara Zor-El is afraid of what she’ll be if she stops helping people. Empty mostly, she thinks.

She’s an urban legend- the Angel of Granville, and then of Kansas. Later when Cat Grant dubs her Supergirl she traces Kara back to the Angel, to that red hoodie, a embroidered patch on her shoulder, blue jeans, gold hair. To the newly dubbed Supergirl hoisting a mangled car over her head. A man crawling out from under it, outlined by the rising sun, shot by a passerby to the accident. Kara was barely sixteen.

* * *

Kal doesn’t like it when she fights with the Kent’s and she can’t not, not when they keep asking her to stop, not when Kal is taking the same stance as Jonathan urging her to let it go. Not when he’s just coming into his power. Not when he barely understands what it sounds like to her, the sounds of someone dying when she could help.

Kal’s Kryptonian is getting rustier by the day and soon he’ll refuse to speak it with her, stop answering to Kal, refuse to acknowledge his powers, the good he could be doing with them. Kara already knows he’ll resent her soon.

 _All children, except one, grow up._ She thinks, having felt some kinship to the lost boys.

* * *

She knows the situation is untenable by the time she turns sixteen, her birthday falling in July. So she memorizes the graduation requirements for SHS and then she goes down to the high school a week before school starts and tests out of every single math, science, and language class that they offer. With those credits under her belt she gets a meeting with the principal and the school counselor and proposes her early graduation.

“I can get a scholarship.” She tells them, “a full ride, if I can just get my history and english credits over the next year.”

The district needs success stories and she watches them realize that she (Kara Kent with the weird accent, Kara Kent, outsider) will be that for them.

“You’ll need two English credits and three history to graduate.” The counselor says. “And you put off those classes last year.”

“This year I’m prepared to take them.” She fibs, because she both is and isn’t prepared for them. Kara’s got a supercomputer in her barn, she’ll manage.

“The history credits will be a problem. We don’t have a way to get all three credits in the year.”

She came prepared for this meeting, “I looked at the community college listings and they offer a art history class in a slot I could attend with the other classes, if you’ll approve the credit.”

The art history class comes paired with a beginners painting class so she’ll still be in school five days a week and it’s in the afternoon, with barely enough time to make it from the high school to the technical college before the class starts which makes it an easy sell to the administration. They sign off on it and tell Kara they need her guardian’s signature.

“Not a problem.” She lies through her teeth, and takes the forms home with her.

* * *

She has a shouting match with the Kents that evening, after the chores are done, dinner is finished, the dishes are clean and dried.

They all say things that cannot be unsaid. 

Kara’s run towards _humans_ like a curse but forgive her this. She’s a child still.

For the first time since she arrived on Earth, Kara does not sleep beneath the Kents roof, choosing instead to shed her tears over the imprint of her mother, to sleep beneath Earth’s stars. She spends her days floating, high above the horizon, listening to the world pass her by.

When she comes home, three days later, the signed permission slip is waiting on her nightstand.

(They spend a great of time not talking about it.)

* * *

Krypton didn’t do art, not the way Earth does. The Artists Guild had been in charge of architecture, design, and keeping the purity of the art of Rao. The art style of Krypton barely shifted in one hundred thousand years of civilization.

Her art history professor spends a week marveling over the consistency of the Egyptians over two thousand years, discusses in depth the break in style that occurred with Akhenaten’s reign. Kara despairs of humanity, barely ten thousand years old, and admires them in equal measure over the course of the class.

After that movements in art come quicker and quicker until they reach the modern age. She’s surprised to find she loves it, the progression of art through the ages, tied in with the advancement of society.

Innovation always and she feels like a traitor for thinking that Krypton could have used a little more of that.

It’s the painting class though that brings her the most joy that year, as she slaves through college applications and fights with the Kents and Kal pulls away from her.

She has steady hands and an imagination fueled by visits to other planets, has no problems recreating what she sees into still lifes. Her teacher calls her talented and she is. It’s the first thing on Earth that she is good at without the history of Krypton weighing her down.

* * *

Kara reverse engineers a solar battery from the schematics in her pod and submits a working model alongside her applications.

(This is not to say it is _easy_. Earth lacks two elements found in abundance on Krypton and Kara only has nextgen schematics. She has to backtrace seven generations of improvements to create a battery that has a chance of being manufactured on Earth and substitute a dozen materials.)

* * *

Clark is twelve then thirteen and he resents her, the spaceships in their barn, the way she refuses to blend in with their classmates. He resents the days spent with his hands over his ears as his powers slowly come, that he can longer join pickup games of football and baseball for fear of hurting his friends.

He loves Kara, but he cannot help but resent her for the burden she puts on his shoulders, the weight of a dead culture.  The first time he tells her she needs to stop, that she’s risking exposing them, her heart breaks.

They are children of the house of El. It is their duty to help. That her cousin has failed to understand this is thus far her greatest failing.

* * *

Kara graduates a year early, valedictorian of a class that has no idea what to do with her, a letter confirming her full ride to Metropolis University at home on her desk.

In her speech she speaks of being stronger together and Kara wonders if anyone is listening. _El Mayarah_ , she prays and plans for a better future.

She had other offers, from better schools but all of them are too far away from her cousin so she turned them down. It’s a twenty minute flight from Metropolis, close enough that if he shouts for her she’ll hear it from the city.

She has a _duty_ after all.

* * *

Kara spends her last summer before college haunting Smallville. She visits the library, the school, the fields, walking the Earth beneath her trying to memorize every last dip and curve. The last time she left her home, there was nothing there to return to.

Here is another, about to be left behind. She cannot shake the feeling that she’ll never be able to return.

* * *

They make a trip of it, packing the whole family and Kara’s things too into the truck for orientation. It’s a six hour drive and the whole way Kara can see Jonathan watching her in the rearview mirror, biting his tongue.

Martha knits in the front seat, clearing her throat every time Jonathan goes to open his mouth. They have collectively said everything there is to say on the subject, at varying volumes, over the course of the last two years.

(They’re still all trying so hard to not say anything unforgivable.)

They fall into the chaos of orientation, drive where directed by a smiling college student. Jonathan makes a show of hauling the heavy boxes up to her dorm, huffing up three flights of stairs.

Kara keeps an ear on his heart, listening for a stutter because she overheard the call he took from the family doctor last week and that’s another thing she has to worry about.

Her randomly assigned roommate, one Mattie Harcourt, is happy to meet her. She’s moving in with the help of a older brother, who ruffles Kal’s hair as he offers to help. Kal picks up a mild case of hero worship and between the six of them they make short work of the boxes and begin unpacking.

They eat dinner together off campus, inviting the Harcourts along for the trip. Martha jokes about one last good meal before they subject themselves to the dining halls and it’s probably the easiest meal Kara has had in a long time.  

The Kents have a long drive back, so they drop Kara and the Harcourts back on campus and drown her in a round of hugs. Kal, Martha, Jonathan.  

“Be good.” Jonathan says, folding her into a hug that shouldn’t hurt.

“I will.” She says, though she finds their definitions of the word differ.

And Jonathan says, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

**Author's Note:**

> My supergirl meta where I scream about Kara Zor-El: Actual Alien is [here](http://openemptysummer.tumblr.com/tagged/kara-zor-el-is-much-more-terrifying-than-superman)
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
